The pool of Thanksgiving horror movies is relatively shallow, with only a handful of requisite titles -like Blood Rage or ThanksKilling– popping up every year. But there’s one glaring omission from the annual Thanksgiving horror discussion: 1997’s made-for-TV movie, Intensity. Based on Dean Koontz’s 1995 novel, this psychological thriller leans into its Thanksgiving setting while going long on the propulsive cat-and-mouse game between a killer and his unwitting prey.
Intensity follows Chyna Sheperd (Molly Parker), a loner with a twisted childhood full of abuse and neglect. She’s comfortable keeping a wall up between herself and everyone around her, which makes her waitress job ideal. Her job’s transactional nature offers her the desired amount of social interaction without having to forge deeper relationships. Against her better judgment and arguments, Chyna reluctantly agrees to accompany her coworker, Laura Templeton (Deanna Milligan), home for Thanksgiving. The Templeton family welcomes Chyna with open arms, but she barely has time to flirt with Laura’s brother before serial killer Edgler Vess (John C. McGinley) sneaks in and begins to pick them off one by one.
Only Chyna survives by hiding in the back of his RV. When she discovers he’s holding a young girl captive, she decides to follow him home.
It’s a setup that likely sounds all too familiar thanks to the more popular New French Extremity horror movie High Tension, released in native France only six years later. It doesn’t help that both rely on the palpable suspense of a heroine continually looking for new places to hide and evade detection by a rampaging killer. It’s not just the slick polish or the theatrical and international attention that pushed High Tension into the forefront, but the brutal violence and bloodletting, too. Intensity, made for Fox television, keeps the bloodshed to the absolute minimum thanks to TV censors. Luckily, it compensates with psychological terror. Intensity also has the benefit of time; its three-hour runtime gives a much broader scope and the room to build character development.
Intensity aired in two parts over two nights. It’s roughly halfway through the first part that Chyna, who’d hidden in the back of Edgler’s RV with the corpse of Laura, seeks aid from the attendants where Edgler has stopped to gas up his vehicle. It’s just as intense as the similar sequence in High Tension, except this version proves far more pivotal as the inciting event that fuels the rest of the lengthy feature. It’s here that Chyna stops seeking to save herself and instead fixates on rescuing Edgler’s captive. It’s also here where Edgler realizes he has a stowaway, sparking a new game for the killer. In other words, the tense gas station sequence marks the vastly diverging paths between the two similar films.
Once home, the mind games and interplay between Edgler and Chyna grow more disturbing, especially when flashbacks reveal Chyna’s harrowing past. McGinley excels at playing a creep, and Edgler’s monologues of his death fetishes and the thrill of committing murder go far in the psychological horror aspect of Intensity. Director Yves Simoneau, working from a teleplay adaptation by Stephen Tolkin, deftly bypasses television’s limitations to create suspense and dread. There’s still plenty of shocks and scares, especially for 1997, found in this miniseries. Even without the gore, one scene in which Chyna nearly gives up after struggling to free herself serves as an effective precursor to the far more visceral degloving of Gerald’s Game.
The film never lets Thanksgiving stray too far from memory, either.
The holiday gets mentioned at nearly every opportunity outside of the ill-fated Thanksgiving that kicks off Chyna’s harrowing journey. Chyna encounters and seeks aid from a passerby, Miriam (Piper Laurie), who tries to chalk Chyna’s hysterics up to the loneliness that Thanksgiving can induce. The gas station attendants heat Thanksgiving-themed tv dinners, though Edgler ensures they won’t get a chance to give thanks. The cop in search of the missing girl, Edgler’s captive, sees his Thanksgiving interrupted. That it’s a holiday break for many proves an added layer of complication when seeking aid from authorities, too. It may not go heavy on the iconography or décor, but the Thanksgiving setting shapes the story.
Between its made-for-TV origins and the fact that it’s out of print on DVD, Intensity is suspenseful Thanksgiving horror that’s slipped through the cracks. It might be tamer, violence-wise, compared to today’s standards, but Simoneau still injects plenty of psychological trauma and tension regardless. McGinley’s performance is magnetic, as usual, and there are some inventive action sequences and obstacles for Chyna to overcome. While much of the holiday’s horror leans hard into humor, Intensity offers a refreshing balance by leaning into its name to bring more intense, serious psychological horror to the Thanksgiving table.
source https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3640833/made-tv-movie-intensity-underseen-thanksgiving-horror/
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